In this ProductTank Pune talk, Akhil Jayaprakash, senior product manager at Amazon, gives us a breakdown of what product managers need to know about the next 100m users in India, including their user personas, the challenges they face, and a sector already solving those problems.
Watch the video to see Akhil’s talk in full or read on for an overview of his key points:
- Who are the next 100m users?
- What are the challenges they face?
- Social commerce impact on challenges
Who are the next 100m users?
As product managers, any solution built for a problem should consider the future generations of users that will be using it. Akhil breaks down the three primary user personas that product managers in India need to note: Aspiring Gen Z, Women, and Determined Merchants.
These user personas can be found in India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Understanding their behaviors and the technology they currently have or are expected to have, is essential to building great products. Product managers should be aware of things like Gen Z being early adopters of solutions, Women relying on family members to help with tech, and merchants typically having two devices or SIM cards for different purposes.
What are the challenges they face?
There are behavioral and technical challenges that each user persona faces. As Akhil explains, many behavioral challenges stem from a lack of trust, technological literacy, and the human element. Therefore product managers should be aware that some of their users might have difficulty navigating apps to make purchases or return goods. Also, personas prefer having their questions about any product answered before purchasing so that they can drive a bargain.
Among the technical challenges, networks become slow at peak times, so product managers need to consider the infrastructure problems that might await them in the future and how some of the personas won’t understand the difference in UX syntax between WhatsApp and share icons.
Social commerce impact on challenges
The social commerce sector in India is connecting small businesses and shoppers through chat and social platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook. Akhil references the fact that avenues are available so that shoppers and retailers can chat directly to eliminate the lack of trust challenge and for shoppers to ask questions about products through live real-time video to create the human element.
The key takeaways from this talk are that when building a product, product managers should learn about their specific users and the problems they are facing before they start building.
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